East African Breweries PLC has announced the appointment of award-winning Justin Mollel as Group Chief Financial Officer and Executive Director Designate. This decision signals both institutional confidence and strategic intentionality.
For anyone who has tracked Mollel’s career across three countries, two of Africa’s most demanding brewing markets, and the boardrooms of one of the world’s most respected consumer goods conglomerates, the appointment carries the unmistakable weight of inevitability.
This is a finance leader who did not ascend by accident. He ascended by design, his own, built over a decade of deliberate, high-stakes performance across the full breadth of the Diageo ecosystem.
Accra, 2024: The Moment the Continent Took Notice
Before the EABL announcement, there was Accra. In 2024, at the defunct InstinctBusiness CFO Summit & Awards(now Africa Finance Festival), one of the continent’s most respected platforms for recognizing financial leadership excellence, Justin Mollel was named CFO of the Year in the Consumer Goods category. The award was not ceremonial. It was a peer and industry validation of a finance leader who had, by that point, already steered Guinness Ghana Breweries PLC through some of the most turbulent macroeconomic conditions West Africa had seen in a generation: currency depreciation, inflationary pressure, demand volatility, and the post-pandemic recalibration of consumer spending.
That Mollel not only held the business together during that period but also continued to drive financial strategy and performance with rigour earned him the recognition. More importantly, it earned him visibility-the kind that moves executive search committees and board conversations. The Accra award was, in retrospect, the public punctuation mark on a body of work that had quietly been building a compelling case for exactly the kind of appointment EABL has now made.
East Africa: Where the Foundation Was Laid
Mollel’s formation as a finance executive happened in Tanzania, at Serengeti Breweries Limited- a Diageo subsidiary that operates in one of East Africa’s most competitive and fast-moving beverage markets. He joined in 2015 as Financial Controller, a role that placed him at the centre of the business’s financial operations, reporting integrity, and cost management.
He progressed through Commercial Finance Manager and Financial Controller simultaneously, then to Commercial Finance and Business Performance Manager, a hybrid role that signalled his growing capacity to bridge operational finance with commercial strategy. By early 2018, he was appointed Acting Finance Director, a short but revealing tenure that demonstrated he could carry the weight of the top finance seat under pressure.
His substantive appointment as Finance Director of Serengeti Breweries followed within months, and he held that role for nearly four years, building the financial architecture, discipline, and strategic muscle that would define everything that came after.
Ghana, Dublin, and the Making of a Group CFO
In March 2022, Mollel moved to Accra as Finance and Strategy Director of Guinness Ghana Breweries PLC – a step up in complexity, geography, and institutional scale. Ghana presented a different set of challenges from Tanzania: a more volatile macroeconomic environment, a larger listed entity with greater investor scrutiny, and the added dimension of integrating strategy into the finance mandate. Mollel operated at that level for over two years, earning the CFO of the Year recognition in the process.
In August 2024, Diageo moved him again – this time to Dublin, as Finance Director for Diageo Ireland, placing him at the heart of the group’s European operations and exposing him to the full breadth of a global spirits and beverages business at its most sophisticated tier. It was the final stage of preparation.
Between Dar es Salaam, Accra, and Dublin, Mollel had accumulated something rare among African finance executives: a genuinely multi-market, multi-currency, multi-regulatory body of experience, all within a single world-class corporate framework. EABL’s board has appointed not just a CFO, but a strategist, a market navigator, and a proven steward of financial performance under pressure. The Group’s next chapter now has its numbers man -and he has already done this before.
